Cd'A approves Health Corridor amid raucous crowd

Despite a late push by concerned residents who spoke of midnight fears they’d lose both property and livelihood, the Coeur d’Alene City Council voted to approve a new Health Corridor urban renewal district designed to revitalize central Coeur d’Alene over the next 20 years.

The crowd, which de-evolved from polite and organized at the beginning of the meeting to rowdy and borderline-disorderly by the end, barked their demands to the six council members, all but one of whom voted to approve the new district.

“What more can we do to calm your concerns and address your fears?” council member Dan English asked the crowd before the vote.

“Vote no,” many in the crowd shouted back.

The 263 acres that now fall under the district’s jurisdiction runs north-south from Interstate 90 to Davidson Avenue and east-west from Government Way to Northwest Boulevard. The new district — driven by ignite cda, Coeur d’Alene’s urban renewal agency — will spend the next two decades fostering growth and revitalization catered toward the health care industry, with Kootenai Health at its economic center.

“It is critical that you understand that the buck stops with you,” State Sen. Mary Souza told the council. “Not with the urban renewal board, because you have the oversight.”

The decision greenlights a long-term vision that could lead to dramatic changes to the area’s transportation landscape. While no specific plans have been formalized or developed, public vision and design workshops held over the summer painted portraits that included a straightening of Ironwood Drive, additional access points into Kootenai Health and even a new overpass that reaches over Interstate 90 to connect the community hospital to Appleway Avenue.

“We’re a health care organization,” Jon Ness, chief executive officer of Kootenai Health, told the council, “and — literally — there are times in the day you cannot turn left.”

“I’m reminded of Nero,” Kootenai County Republican Central Committee chair Brent Regan said in opposition to the role of government in economic development, “when he burned down half of Rome so he could build a palace and a big statue of himself and an ampitheater. We don’t need to do that. We don’t need to take large swaths of the city and re-engineer it in a vision that is brought in from somebody else, and to make it the same kind of boring, awful sameness that you see when you travel the country.”

Toward the end of the citizens’ line of dissent, members and leaders of Embyrs, a church on Ironwood Drive, expressed worry their church would one day be wiped off the map for the sake of growth. Others expressed outrage, as Tuesday night’s meeting was the first they’d claimed to hear of the Health Corridor, an urban renewal district that has been in various planning stages over more than two years.

After a testy exchange between lone council dissenter Dan Gookin and ignite cda executive director Tony Berns — a repeat of the council meeting fireworks two weeks earlier — Gookin lambasted the plan as vague, the organizational structure as overreaching and the economic value as a government subsidy. When council president Woody McEvers, who filled in for a recused Mayor Steve Widmyer, asked Berns to respond to Gookin’s claims, Gookin fired back a salvo of defiance aimed at McEvers.

“Actually, I would prefer if council would debate and not keep bringing in a staff member,” Gookin charged. “… Do you want [Berns] and I to argue, or do you want us to talk about it as the citizens’ representatives?”

“We just listened to you go the other way,” McEvers replied. “Unless somebody here [objects], I want to hear it from the guy that runs the organization.”

“I think the people want to hear from their elected officials,” Gookin barked to racuous applause from the audience, “and not be swayed by someone who’s paid to push urban renewal in the state. I tell you: When the Legislature was going to repeal and remove the power of eminent domain from urban renewal agencies, LCDC/ignite was sending their lobbyists to Boise to fight it. So why do you want to hear from him? I want to hear from you.”

Opponents voiced one last united protest during the meeting’s public comments section: Of the 24 people who showed to comment on the evening’s agenda, 20 stood in opposition to ignite cda’s proposal, while three voiced their support. (One man, Dr. Norman Leffler, showed to demand the resignations of all involved in the Marker #11 Arts Commission scandal.) The vast majority of dissenters spoke of their concerns over the prospects of eminent domain, the concept of a government agency legally assuming permanent control of private property for the sake of a public benefit.

During Berns’ testimony, he told of numerous cases where negotiations — both won and lost by ignite cda — led to a change in the plan, rather than deployment of eminent domain. Before the vote, Berns said the public conversation drifting toward eminent domain has been a distraction that only hurts the public.

“I really think this conversation of eminent domain has been a disservice to the project,” he told The Press as the council continued to debate. “Ignite cda has no intent to ever use eminent domain. We never have used eminent domain, and all it’s doing is riling up people who are unfortunately scared.”

Gookin’s push to resist the new district forced a change in the vote to approve the adoption, but only a cursory change: Language discussing eminent domain was removed from the ordinance at the council’s request, though the urban renewal agency retains the right of eminent domain, should the need ever arise.

“We need to work with the urban renewal agency and the city to address some of these public infrastructure issues, which then starts to influence future growth,” Ness said at the end of the debate. Kootenai Health has eminent domain authority, and like ignite, we have never used it. We have no plans to use it. That was never the intention.”

The vote passed 5-1.